


The Birthday of the Sea

by paperiuni



Series: Stories from the Saintshead Light [2]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Coping, Friendship, Gen, Lighthouse Keeper AU, Side Story, Slice of Life, The Lighthouse AU Prequel Nobody Asked For, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23813695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: A month into his new job, Alec finds a strange girl in the parking lot. Her name is Maia, and she's come to stay. Together they navigate some stormy waters and work to keep some people safe.This is a side story (about a boy, a girl, and a lighthouse at the butt end of the universe) for my lighthouse AU,The Stair Into the Sea. Spoilers up to chapter 7 of the main fic.
Relationships: Alec Lightwood & Maia Roberts
Series: Stories from the Saintshead Light [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1715773
Comments: 30
Kudos: 43





	The Birthday of the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel for _[The Stair Into the Sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18805834)_. It's also a self-indulgent yarn I wrote to crack my writer's block and for a little extra insight into Alec and Maia.
> 
> If you ask me, the sweet spot to read this is after chapter 7 of the main fic. If you want to keep a pristine line of not even vague extra spoilers, read this one once the main fic is finished. We're in Alec's POV here.
> 
>  **Content Notes** : Discussion of loss/grief, mentions of a past abusive relationship.

_Under this weather  
_ _Under this weather  
_ _Such shadows are blossoming  
_ _Out at sea_

 _I am not going to set myself free here  
_ _I am following some dark fortune  
_ _Some circle in me_

—Patrick Wolf, 'This Weather'

*

On his thirtieth day as a lightkeeper, Alec woke to find a girl in the parking lot.

She was setting a bike the color of old thistles in the rack by the office porch. Her hair curled in a black, abundant ponytail, and a leather backpack hung off her shoulder.

 _Damn hikers_ , was Alec's first thought, dark and bitter as the coffee waiting in his mug. He stomped blearily onto his own front step and shouted, "Hey! You're on government property, and it's not visitor day!"

The girl—young woman, really, light brown skin, dust-covered sneakers, capris with decorative patches at the knee, a tee-shirt emblazoned with the legend _Jem and the Silent Brothers_ in a faux-gothic font—was undaunted. She marched right up to him, her hand extended.

"Morning. Maia Roberts, new lightkeeper, not trespassing. Are you Thomas Greenlaw?" Every clipped word suggested one of them was acting like a professional, and her initials made out _M. R._

Alec blinked. The ground failed to open up under him. _Shit._

He'd known, in principle, that the Lights Commission was sending somebody. The old keeper who showed him the ropes took off yesterday. It was probably a little sooner than he should've been legally allowed.

It made sense that the somebody in question would be here today. Bright and early. While Alec was still oozing around in his sleepwear, because the weather was clear and there was nobody breathing down his neck, and he was _alone_ for the first time in a month.

"No." He shoved his mug on the sill next to the empty flower pots. "I'm Alec. Lightwood. Junior keeper. Senior, technically, since Mr. Greenlaw's gone." Her hand hovered, so he took it. Her grip was smart and lasted for exactly one and a half shakes.

"I called twice from the bus station, but the line was busy, so I figured I'd bike over." She jerked a thumb at her conveyance. The overstuffed canvas duffel tied to the carrier looked kind of threadbare. "Scenic ride, at least."

"Yeah. Uh, the fax machine might be backed up again. The Rosewell office probably sent your paperwork, and that's jammed our office line." Dry amusement quirked his lip. "That's a thing that happens."

She laughed, a whip-crack of genuine mirth. "You're really selling this place to me. Welcome to the Lighthouse at the Butt End of the Universe, here's our crumbling tower, our crappy communications, our boathouse about to fall into the sea..."

"You're not far off there." Somewhere in the last fifteen seconds, Alec had lost both his ire and most of his mortification. "Douglas Adams reference?"

"Oh, yeah." Her smile had the same flashing quality as her laugh. "Somewhere I can put my stuff? I can wait for the rest of the tour until you're dressed."

A timely question: how much of a disaster was the other side of the keepers' house? Greenlaw had been a sour bachelor at the best of times, pickled in whiskey and brine and the same loneliness that to Alec, at this stage, was more like blessed solitude.

"I'll show you. Though, no offense, you look like you came on the overnight coach. If you want breakfast first, I can... crack more eggs? There's coffee, too."

Her chin tilted. The smile returned, in a softer, slightly startled version. "That'd be nice. Thanks."

*

Here was the thing about the Saintshead Light, Saintshead, Briarwood Borough: nobody wanted it, but everybody needed it.

The lighthouse stood on a treacherous spot on a popular boating route and near an important shipping channel. It was also just about as far out west as you could get without swimming, buried in the hinterland of Rosewell Isle. The equipment groaned under its long years of use, and the station buildings had sweated off their coats of paint. The previous keepers had done the bare minimum to skim above dereliction of duty. The only thing thriving in the yard was the young black rowan planted next to the office: spring had barely scraped across the harsh landscape and budded the birch and the aspen, when the black rowan already burst in a riot of glossy new leaves.

Alec had come up the same road as Maia, the road that ended here, and felt something slot into place in his soul. The sea stretched to the blue horizon, and the heath and the trees and the cliffs breathed a wordless welcome. It'd been the first day in a year and three months that he felt calm.

The guilt followed, of course, like a shadow drawn plain when the sun broke through the cloud. It always would.

Still, he skated through his orientation more awake and alive than he'd felt ever since the accident. The work wore him out enough that he tumbled into bed and slept without dreams. Greenlaw didn't want his company, so Alec was spared the trouble of offering.

Maia was a definite change. She'd worked at Hammer Moor Station outside Rosewell—an actual city—for four months, until a much-wrangled decision to automate the beacon had come through and made her redundant. She'd been offered Saintshead as a replacement. Alec raised a brow at that. She countered with a brow of her own and a muttered, "It'll get me my Master's."

He let it lie. Her ghosts were just less literal than his own.

They scrubbed Greenlaw's side of the house—now Maia's—and piled all the unsalvageable furniture in the van. Maia slept on Alec's couch until her new bed arrived, and then they ceremonially drove to the landfill, unloaded the old crap, and got her new frame and mattress on the way back. She played something called New Order the entire drive home, humming along in the way that used to drive Mom up the wall every time Izzy would do it.

Alec didn't mind.

It was pretty easy not to mind Maia Roberts. Sure, she had a hair-trigger sarcasm button, loud taste in clothing, and an opinion about everything, but Alec had grown up with a sister and brother who crashed their way into every room and whose hijinks he'd covered up for years.

Maia showed up for her shifts on time, used headphones when Alec was trying to sleep, and never lost the car keys. He'd lived in barrack rooms with a dozen other bodies. In comparison, she was an uncrowned saint of cleanliness.

Sometimes, when Izzy's twice-a-month letter came, or he had a rare, fraught-but-hopeful call from his mother, he caught a flicker of yearning in her eye as she passed him the mail or ducked away to let him talk in peace.

Alec had his little collection of photos on the bookshelf. As far as he could tell by his visits to her side, the only one she had out was of her and a girl with long, bleached braids, squatting in a flowerbed, laughing. It was tacked to the wall in her bed nook, kind of out of sight. A sister? They didn't look much alike. A friend, Alec decided.

She was somebody he could live with in the reasonably close quarters of the station. She didn't mind his comings and goings or his preference to largely be alone. She'd hogged the good typewriter, but volunteered to type up all the logs if he took up a corresponding amount of yard work. It worked out.

As summer went, autumn came. On his free days, Alec walked the shoreline, first along the hiking trails, then, as the landmarks sank into his memory, wherever he liked.

There'd been no nightmares for six months. No images in the corner of his eye. No Max.

 _It's better_ , he dared tell himself. _I'm getting better._

*

Alec woke to somebody else's screams, so at least that was novel. He scrambled down from the loft in his pajama pants and the gray fisherman's sweater Mom had sent him for his birthday ( _hand-made locally, guaranteed to last a generation_ , the little brochure had declared cheerfully). The layer of permafrost disguised as the floor reminded him he'd left his socks. On the wall, the display unit tapped into the watch room systems shone an innocent green light. The beacon spun on beyond the kitchen window, a dim yellow sweep in a familiar rhythm.

It had looked like a night they could both get some sleep.

He crept onward to the corridor joining their sides and Maia's door at the end. "Maia? You okay in there?"

There was a vague noise from beyond the door. It might've been, _go away_.

The interior doors, flimsy replacements to the original fittings, were kind of crap at insulating anything. Alec knew this because he also knew too much about the various and variegated topics of Greenlaw's semi-drunken soliloquies.

He sat down with his back to the door and his ass to the icy floor. It was what it was. 

"You know," he said, "since we're both up, here's an idea I had today. I know it's October now, but like, next spring, we could try and resurrect the yard. Put some actual vegetables in the vegetable patch. Lettuce, I guess. Tomatoes? Carrots? I found some old flower pots in the shed, too."

A rustle and a clatter. Small, near-silent footfalls.

"I dunno what even grows in this soil, but I bet they sell better dirt in the village."

Pretty close on the other side, a muffled giggle sounded.

"I'm just saying!" He gestured, pointlessly, to his unseeing audience. "We could have, like, flowers. Begonias are therapeutic, or so my mom says. Or maybe herbs. Something else nice than that house-tree. I really don't get how our illustrious predecessors didn't manage to kill it, too, but there she blows."

A beat. "Minus ten points for inappropriate use of _Moby Dick_ quote," Maia said, from below the keyhole, "but plus fifty for the garden idea. No fucking begonias, though. My parents had them every summer."

"Fine. No fucking begonias." Alec fiddled with his sweater sleeve, then let a great deep breath well from him. "You want some tea?"

The door snicked open. She padded through, sensibly wrapped in a tasseled blanket, her messy hair trailing down her back like a tame thunderhead. "As long as it's not chamomile."

"She comes with demands, huh? I've got mint. I think."

She sat in one of the hideous baby-blue spoke-back chairs Alec was _so_ going to paint a better color and melted across the tabletop like a kid half her age. It was a bit weird, not something he'd expect from daytime Maia, but it fit this picture.

He kept nattering about the yard as he made the tea, feeling a mental soreness at so much talking in one go. Their conversations, when they happened, were usually not continuous affairs, but went on in little snippets as they ran into each other throughout the day. Maybe they could paint the pots, too. Since they were already going to start on the buildings next summer. Did she know anything about gardening?

"My friend's grandfather keeps a greenhouse. And this huge apple orchard." Her hand swept up as if to paint a treetop in the air. "I lived with them for a bit in Rosewell, before I moved to Hammer Moor. I haven't really kept in touch. It's..."

Alec scooped up the dangling thread there. "Was that while you went to the U of R? Sorry, I'm not supposed to talk about the fact that I've seen your resumé."

"Bachelor of Science in two years." She snapped to the question like a released rubber band. "Technically three, since I still have to turn in my thesis."

"If you needed the typewriter for that, you could've just said so."

"But it was more fun to sneak it onto my desk while you weren't looking." She pushed her hair back with her fingers. "God, this gets _everywhere_."

"Can't comment. Mine's never been longer than this." Alec shrugged one shoulder, hopefully sympathetic.

Heaving a world-consuming sigh, she got stiffly to her feet. "Okay, you, um, go back to bed. I'll try to scream quieter next time. Thanks for the tea."

Frowning, Alec rewound the conversation. She'd flicked from almost relaxed to a tension gathering in every joint. What had happened?

"Hey," he said to her retreating back. "You can take the couch, if you want."

He had no idea where that came from. Some ingrained big-brother impulse he only got to employ in writing these days, scribbling replies to Izzy's letters that still came with reassuring regularity, with Jace's slanted footnotes attached to her news. Maia was older than Izzy, and about six times more practical than his fierce dreamer of a sister.

She shook her head in the doorway, and the door clicked shut.

*

The next day, Alec came back from his supply run to the village to a glaring lack of Maia to greet him. She'd left her shopping list on the noteboard next to the phone, where they kept notes of household stuff.

"Your ice cream's gonna melt!" he called toward her side. "I'm out of freezer space, so come and claim—"

The corridor joining their sides housed the storage closets and the bathroom, the door to which was open. Loose black tresses lay everywhere across the worn green tile. A pair of scissors had been tossed into the sink.

Alec had lived with his own grief and its peculiarities great and small for long enough to recognize what this was. An outpouring of some pain, some knot so convoluted that the only way to get free was to cut the ropes.

He made room for Maia's ice cream in the freezer. He folded the scissors shut and put them on the shelf. Then he collected the mass of abandoned hair and bagged it, carefully. You didn't add to people's destruction.

It was Friday, so they'd planned to cook together, which they usually did on Maia's side. She had the actual kitchen, with the oven; Alec had gotten the brick fireplace by way of trade.

Coffee and sandwiches it was then. He'd live.

She didn't show up when he went to the lighthouse to take the weather station readings and turn on the beacon. Her bike and both the cars were in the yard. He resisted the urge to call her on the radio, if she'd even taken hers in the first place. She knew the cliffside paths. She'd have a lamp. He couldn't fret about her like some runaway lamb.

That didn't stop him from peering toward the birch stand behind the station, or the cliff tops with their shroud of dying grass, as he made his way back. _Keep an eye on her_. He sent the thought out as if it'd help. _Please._

The sun was gone, and the last shadows lay sunken against the dulling landscape. Somewhere at the edge of the cove just north of the station, a lone light flickered, a pale, pulsing glow. An unseasonal hiker with a headlamp. Somebody's porch light, displaced by distance. Or Maia, seeking refuge in the evening stillness of the empty shore.

He'd wait another hour. Then he'd call.

Shivering under his layers of sweater and jacket, he went back in and lit the fireplace. The wet chill from the sea cut to the bone.

He'd managed to sink most of the way into his book and the comforting crackle of the fire, when the front door creaked. He generally didn't bother locking it.

"Can I come in?"

It said something that Maia stayed on the threshold until he motioned her inside. She kicked off her blue rubber boots and set them diligently in the entryway. Her hair unpeeled from her hood about a fourth the length it'd been, in springy, chopped curls that went every which way.

Their co-worker-slash-housemate code definitely didn't cover this. Alec _understood_ , but he didn't have _details_ , and the details could make all the difference.

"First anniversary," she said, clear and toneless. "I used not to really believe that stuff about how people freak out on the dates of whatever bad thing happened to 'em. I mean, it's just a _date._ It turns out, experience is a bitch of a teacher."

"You wanna sit?" Alec folded himself up into one end of the couch. She perched on the side he had vacated, knees together, feet tipped inward, as unlike herself as he'd ever seen her.

He knew she'd made friends with some of the village kids. The talkative, distractible boy who part-timed in the bookstore. Luke Garroway's daughter with all the drawings. They were barely on the better side of teenage, but it was pretty slim pickings in a place this small. Instead, she'd come to him, out of all the people in this remote corner of the universe.

"Not like this was the first tragedy in my life, either. Just the first one that... that came from somebody I picked for myself."

"Asshole boyfriend?" Alec made the question as light as he could.

"Got it in one." She snapped a hand up in satiric triumph. "Just when I thought I'd survived the family bullshit."

"Uh, I'm not an expert"—that earned a dry guffaw from Maia, but she said nothing—"but my sister tends to rely on either ice cream or booze in these situations? Like, general cases of 'a man has wronged me and homicide is still not legal'."

"Do we _have_ any alcohol in the house? Damn, we should've saved some of Greenlaw's stash."

"No," Alec said. "Definitely not."

"True, though." She pitched forward between her knees. Her hair flopped along. "I... don't suppose you're handy with scissors?"

"I'd probably make it worse. Sorry."

"It's fine." She glanced sideways at him, and her eyes mellowed. "Sorry I ruined our dinner plans."

If she'd been Izzy, he'd have hugged her. If she'd been Jace, he'd have first punched her in the arm, then hugged her. As it was, it was dawning on Alec that his tendency to a stoic front and lack of casual human contact with non-family members were working against him here.

"Mm-hm. Eat ice cream and see if the antenna will let us watch the late night movie instead?"

"Even if it's weird contemplative science fiction?"

"Hey, I like _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_."

"Which is my point." Maia scrounged up the week's paper from the firewood basket and pointed at the TV page. "Tonight's offering: weird contemplative science fiction, in Russian."

"Please. It was art cinema or nothing in our house, I'm not scared of subtitles."

"Okay." The word landed softly. "Give me a minute."

She picked up her boots and jacket from the rack, and, on her way past, put her hand on his shoulder. Her grip had a subtle weight to it, a tension she always carried and rarely let show. He touched her sleeve, fumbled a little, and finally let his hand slide down her arm as she broke the contact.

Curled into their respective ends of the couch, they ate ice cream and watched all 166 minutes of Tarkovsky's _Solaris_ without the antenna fritzing out once. Over the end credits, Maia dozed off in the slow warmth of the fire, so Alec tucked a blanket over her and stole off to his own bed in the loft.

*

An incomplete list on the keepers' communal noteboard at Saintshead Light Station: 

_Things Roberts & Lightwood Are Going to Do At the Station This Year: _

  * _paint the house_
  * _paint the office_
  * _paint some fucking flower pots_
  * _parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme~ (and some other herbs)_
  * _ride the Commission's ass until they replace the generator_
  * _same, but the fax machine_
  * _same, but hiring Simon to help with tours in summer_
  * _get Alec ~~drunk~~ responsibly inebriated, since he had to miss New Year's_
  * _sheesh, what kind of ex-military are you if you've never been wasted on awful booze_
  * the kind that flew really expensive planes at really high altitudes and had to be sober to do it
  * _stop intruding on my list, Alec_
  * I will when you stop casting aspersions on my character
  * take Maia skating on sea ice because she's never been
  * _the ocean is scary, okay, I'm working on it_
  * so you're gonna conquer it with science?
  * _curses, you've seen through my cunning plan!_
  * get the launch fixed so if somebody's in distress we can get them ashore vs. just waving encouragingly from the boathouse
  * sort through the crap in the office attic
  * _TBC_



*

The headland started awake as spring thaw rushed over it not unlike a bucket of water on a dirty porch. The light station, too, jolted back into its busier summer rhythms after the drowsy winter.

Saintshead was a remote, stolid community of remote, stolid people whose favorite pastime was minding their own business. That was, as Maia put it, they were extremely keen on each other's business, but not much anybody else's. A single year wasn't enough to make Alec one of them, but he made some inroads. Shouted good morning to Mrs. Vera if she was in her garden as he went past, stopped to chat with Mr. Garroway and asked about his horses or his apple trees, popped into the bookstore so often that Mrs. Early joked they should have a rewards card just for him.

The muck of spring overwhelmed the low-lying parts of the landscape, so Alec cast his hope to the heights and the hills that rambled to the north of the village. He'd never lived this far out in the country before. He'd run track, an orderly loop, a determined course from start to finish.

The wilderness opened to him like a hidden door: miles and miles of meadows and woods and craggy slopes—also overwhelmed by the muck of spring, but hey, he had rubber boots—where the wind was the only sound and the whole island his companion.

(Saintshead had been an island of its own until land uplift had joined it to the mass of Rosewell Isle. These days the channel between them was only wet at the highest tides of the year. This, too, was a bone the villagers had chosen to pick with the laws of nature; they still lived and died as _islanders_ , never mind the entire country was an archipelago.)

Local-scale geopolitics aside, Alec walked. He wore through his hiking boots. He bought every hiking map the bookstore or the tourist info had, then walked until he didn't need them. Maia grew accustomed to brief parleys over morning coffee before he took off with what was, in hindsight, probably a slightly manic look in his eye. He'd found if not peace or meaning, at least a sliver of happiness in the high lonely places of the headland.

In early June, the dreams came back.

The paradox was this: he didn't remember the crash. He'd seen the police photos. He'd given a statement. He'd talked to a therapist selected by his mother. He'd given up his career, moved away from his family, hurt himself and those he loved.

And still, he reconstructed the accident in his dreams night after night. The other driver, the weather, the street, the children's radio program Max had complained about. _Put on Jace's mixtape._ The shrapnel that had rained on them both as the windshield shattered.

Alec had survived the blood loss. He could survive the visions. He had to. For Izzy and Jace, for Mom. For the chance to untangle his estrangement with Dad, if he felt like it one day. 

_One day_ had not really been in his vocabulary lately. It was still hard to think beyond today. Sure, everybody's future was a blank canvas, but most people he met had been handed a palette. He didn't even have finger paints.

Instead, he had dreams. Not _nightmares_ , horrors rising up to strangle the air from his sleeping lungs, but vivid heart-clenching things that left his hands shaking and his senses convinced there was snow on his face and a limp, precious body in his lap.

At least it was summer. He could go sit on the porch and watch the beacon turn in the twilight.

Sometimes, Maia came out after him, with a mug of tea that she passed to him, every gesture underlining _this is not a big deal, don't make it one_ , or with an underground art zine she'd borrowed from Simon, full of questionable poetry she read aloud until he gave in and laughed.

"It's maybe kinda mean to mock them," he said, shaking his shoulders. "How old are those kids writing this stuff?"

"Old enough to misuse _tumescence_ as a dick metaphor."

"You're right. That's fair."

"I mean, that's all this is. Dick metaphors for frustrated art scene boys who can't take the idea that their dream girl sweats and farts." Maia shrugged sagely. "I'd suggest we burn the whole thing, but Simon would be sad."

Simon was four years younger than her, which meant her attitude to him was that of a fondly long-suffering older sister. He _was_ pretty handy with their tourist groups, though, and Alec could be thankful, since it meant his yoke of job-related human interaction was that much lighter.

"You say that like you don't wanna go to the bonfire at Cobbler's Beach so you can look at guys."

"You know I'm not _looking_. My asshole quota is full for at least the next five years. I literally just miss faces that don't come from the same set of two hundred, or that I'm not paid to look at. Are _you_ gonna do anything more interesting than be my dutifully almost-sober ride home?"

Something in him teetered at the question. As a rule, she didn't try to pump him for his dating history, which was nice of her. Of course, he knew enough about hers to hedge around it unless she brought it up first, which she kind of had.

"I dunno," he said, stretching his arms up. "Depends on the guys."

"You nerd," she said, with odd, prickly warmth, and jostled her shoulder against his. "You're still coming, right? I already called Bat. Don't make him give up his midsummer for nothing."

"Of course." Alec blinked into the blue of the night. The trees moved gently in the land breeze. There they were, the real shapes of things. "I'm coming."

*

"Here you are," Maia declared, like she'd unearthed Alec from a deeper hideout than the swing set on the beachside playground. "Are you okay?"

Closer to the waterline, a bass beat thundered from toiling loudspeakers set on the roof of somebody's car. Something collapsed in the bonfire, which belched up a cloud of red sparks, to general merriment from the crowd gathered there.

Alec turned from his scrutiny of the vacant shore beyond the party. "Here I am. I just—just needed a breather."

She held out an uncorked beer bottle. "I swear this is not peer pressure—you can say no—but you can also have one. And come with me and dance to this _shit_ music. It works better if you're at least a little drunk. I'll be your bodyguard."

He watched the darkness above her shoulder gleam with a light, too low to be a bright summer star, though it rather looked like the brilliant point of Venus had dropped onto the wooded shore and was blinking between the trees. Beat. Beat. Beat. He had the most disingenuous feeling his heart was setting itself to the same rhythm.

 _Again_ , he thought. _I've seen that before._

"Yeah," he said, too close to a gasp, and took the bottle. "Lead on."

"Wow." Her eyes widened. "Fantastic. I was just maybe expecting a little more resistance."

"Don't push your luck, Roberts. If that girl with the bangs comes within three feet of me again, I'm gone."

"For full disclosure—" Prior dancing to the shit music had stuck her tank top to her back; she pinched a seam between her fingers and tried to unstick it. "For full disclosure, I got no fewer than four questions about where you were. The girls of Cobbler's Beach have the scent of a prime piece of North Isle beefcake, and—" Her face cinched with unwilling mirth. "I can't go on, we're co-workers. You're the prettiest thing they've seen all year. I'm so sorry."

"It's okay." Alec took a drink of the beer. It was warm, but only middlingly hideous. "You promised they'd have to go through you."

He'd never heard Maia express any kind of opinion on his potential appeal or lack thereof. He knew _she_ was beautiful, like he knew Izzy was gorgeous: in plain fact that moved him no more than the shipping forecast.

He could go and get a little drunk. Better than getting so moonstruck he thought a star had landed on the beach. Even if that was exactly what it had looked like.

She laughed, from deep in her gut, her whole upper body tilting back with it. "If I fall, avenge me."

It was a relief, in more ways than one, to join in her laughter.

*

Much later, the bonfire guttered slowly in a drift of embers, the music had faded to a smattering of car radios, and the party was scattering. A clump of skinny-dippers splashed in the shallow water. The bushes next to which Alec had parked—on the outskirts, so they could leave smoothly—rustled suspiciously. If anybody started moaning, he was prepared to lean on the car horn.

Lolling gently on her roost on the car hood, Maia said, "Can I tell you something? It might be weird."

She had defended him gallantly through multiple bottles of beer (shared between them) and at least a couple shots of appalling rum (drunk by her, on a dare), a lot of bad dancing (the best part), and several overly friendly people. Alec was inclined to be generous. "Shoot."

"I am honestly, fabulously okay with that I'm going home with you. To our stupid cozy house by the sea, where we work our asses off so some sailors somewhere don't hit our reef." He couldn't tell exactly how drunk she was. The difference between sober Maia and bashed Maia seemed to be mostly a matter of how giggly she was and how easily she might verbally eviscerate somebody.

"You said you weren't looking, remember? I do."

"I could've still kissed somebody." She rolled her wrist, her fingers splaying. "I mean, technically, you're pretty, but also, too much drama."

"Agreed." He leaned down until his back was slanted against the windshield. "And technically, you're pretty, but I'm gay."

She made a tiny sound that wasn't quite _oh_ , but only the first coy exhalation preceding it. Then she blew out the rest of the breath. He watched her, but let her surprise play out. Sometimes, this wasn't a big thing. He'd trusted it wouldn't be a big thing with her, but you could never _know_.

"Okay," she said. "That's good to know." Then she inclined, carefully, until her shoulder pressed into his. "That also doesn't change the first thing I said."

"In that case," he said, abruptly choked, his chin against her sweat-damp hair, "I'm okay with that, too."

*

Midway through September, the dreams eased off. That only left the waking hours for him to contend with.

Alec did his best to anchor himself in the work, in movie nights with Maia, in calls with his family in which nobody talked about Max. In October, Maia took two weeks off to visit her friend Gretel and Gretel's grandfather in Rosewell. Alec bought a cheap camera to record his autumn hikes and sent his mother a stuffed envelope of pictures, his first real letter to her beyond the obligatory birthday wishes and such. He accepted Mr. Garroway's invitation to both play chess with him sometimes and call him Luke.

 _It's a beautiful place, sweetheart_ , Mom wrote back, in her immaculate copperplate handwriting. Then, _You know Isabelle is getting her Bachelor's this Christmas. I bring this up because she doesn't want to ask you. She's convinced you won't come. But it is your baby sister's graduation._

Of course Izzy had intuited the truth he now had to spell out to his mother. Izzy never said, _Come back to us_ , so Alec never had to say, _I can't._ Izzy had her studies and Jace had his job and Mom had her new enterprise in Kirkwall, which was across two main islands and half a day by bus from Saintshead.

They had knit back some part of the family he'd broken.

Beyond that, he wasn't so sure he was the brother and son they remembered anymore. Grief changed you. Distance changed you. The things he'd seen—that he kept seeing—were bending him slowly and inexorably into a new shape.

He sent Izzy flowers, dark red roses that were probably reserved for romantic love in every kind of flower language, but they were also her favorite, so symbolism could get screwed. Maia took a picture of him on the porch, and he took a picture of the lighthouse against a sunset, and the photos went in between Izzy's card.

The day of her graduation, he went walking as snow tumbled from a windless sky, pristine, chilling flakes that heaped silently on the frost-gripped ground.

There was a young woman on the hill, lost and bemused, snow in her dark hair. He gave her a granola bar and strict instructions to follow his tracks to the marked trail and stick to it. She smiled a stiff, haggard smile, and vanished into the snow.

On any other day, he'd have guided her back to the road, at least. He kept walking all the way to the hilltop. The sea was a field of churned ice, not quite solid, black veins of open water showing through.

On the way back, he stopped at the rest area that was a little off the hiking trail. It was pretty bare-boned: a stone-ringed fire pit and a lean-to, a small outhouse and a garbage bin. He sat for a minute to rest his legs and drink the last of his coffee from the thermos.

As he rose, something crunched under his backpack. He picked up the granola bar, still in its wrapper, from where it had been set on the bench.

He left it there, and went home without looking back.

*

"Hey," Maia said, one particularly dreary day in March, "when's your birthday?"

Neither of them had ever made any noise about birthdays. Maia had used hers as an occasion to have some friends over, but Alec had, gently, opted to work that evening so she could have the house. Her second one in Saintshead was coming up somewhere in the spring.

"August." Alec looked up from his book. They were doing their established version of alone together: the doors to the corridor were open on both sides, and Maia drifted back and forth, doing chores, reading a comic, chattering to Alec in comfortable doses. "Why?"

She peered into the afternoon gloom. The last dregs of winter dripped off the branches and puddled in every dent and depression. Ice still held the cove in a tenuous grip. The only colors in the world were light gray, dark gray, and depressing gray. "Would've been convenient if it was today. I feel like baking a cake. Dressing up. You know, _something_ that's not wool socks and sweaters and ten log entries that say, _still overcast, ice thickness four point six, solid cover_."

"You can bake a cake anyway. I'll eat it."

"God, what do you know, you've lived in that sweater since September."

"I could put on a bow tie, if you think that'd make it pop."

"Lightwood, you don't _own_ a bow tie. You haven't been festive enough for a bow tie in your li—oh, holy shit."

She stilled as the long, booming report of a crack in the ice echoed from the bowl of the cove. They'd been hearing the rustlings for some days, and now each morning was a bet whether ice or open water would greet them on the shore. In the Sunday silence, they listened to the creaks and complaints of the shifting ice masses after the first bang.

"There it goes," Alec said. "There's your cause for a birthday party, too."

"For what, the sea?" She angled an eyebrow. "That's a weird point of poetry from you."

"Why not? It has to come out again every year, unlike some of us."

She shook her head, but it was mostly fond. "Well, you're weird, but at least you're my kind of weird. Blueberries or chocolate for the cake?"

"Both," he said. "If you wanna dress up, too, I'll lend you my bow tie."

"You do _not_ mix chocolate and blueberries in my kitchen," she said, "but I'll take the bow tie."

In the end, Alec dug up a jar of apricot jam, and they made a brave attempt at a Sachertorte, hung old paper streamers from the kitchen lamp and bookshelf, and toasted the sea as it went on cracking the ice.

Maia wore the bow tie better than he ever had.

*

A few days after the ice cover broke, Maia went down to the cove again.

If Alec had restless feet, she had a natural philosopher's fascination with everything that lived on the shoreline. The cove bordered the scattered reef itself, a maze of sharp underwater rock that would be partially exposed by a low tide, making it possible to venture onto the littoral. The cliffside path was steep and slippery, but she tightened her boots, brought her radio, and took it step by step—or so she was quick to reassure Alec every time he said anything.

The funny thing, which lived a little under his conscious mind, was this: he knew he would make it home. He'd never gotten lost in Saintshead. It was some close cousin to the feeling he'd had when he first came, on the bus like Maia, toting a couple of bags of earthly belongings. That here was a haven. A place where he could be useful. Where he could climb up a clanging staircase to tend to a light that had saved lives for over a hundred years. Where he could pull up weeds and make a garden grow. Where he could be a friend to somebody that got him and didn't care about his past.

It wasn't much, but it was his. Maybe it was the first place that ever truly had been. No matter what he'd lost to end up there.

And he knew Maia was capable and careful. He just had no certainty.

He finished changing the blown fuse in the watch room and glanced outside. There was a light mist over the ocean, curling from the shore as the spring-mellowed air hit the still-gelid sea.

Tapping the radio absently, he said, "Hey. You coming up soon? Over." They didn't bother with much protocol over the radiophone, since it was just the two of them.

Instead of her voice, there was a noise like somebody had dragged the receiver over gravel: a rasping and groaning that poured a chill down his spine.

"Maia? Maia!" As if she could hear him while _whatever that was_ was transmitting. She'd dropped her radio. Her radio was malfunctioning. She'd slipped and he was listening to her struggling in some death-trap in the littoral.

With a final dry rattle, the noise died.

"Maia?" He opened the channel to listen: nothing. The radio was mute.

He sprinted out the door without his coat on and left it wide open behind him. From the cloven rim of the cliff, he could see the cove through a fine sieving of mist: no movement anywhere, no telltale flash of red jacket. Had she worn that one today?

Alec skimmed down the path, grazing his knuckle at the narrow spot where you had to hug the wall. The tide had turned. The dry areas would be underwater in the next hour. He'd sacrificed his good vantage point coming down, but her tracks would be in the sand and seagrass. There weren't that many good paths down.

He shut away the juddering fear. He hadn't thought about flying in a while—had shut it away like most other things from his life before his brother's death—but something like a piloting trance came over him. A sense of cold, uncompromising lucidity. _I have to find her._

She'd gone down right below the cliffside path. He wet his sneakers in the first five minutes, skirting pools she had trotted through with impunity in her rubber boots. He clambered over rocks that did not lead to more footprints and had to double back.

 _Please_ , he said, to somebody, to something that might be listening. _Not her. Not like this._

The chill of the cove bottom permeated him slowly but without a shred of mercy. The mist thickened in that treacherous way where a fixed point you had one moment would be gone the next. Glancing at his watch, he stared as the second hand twitched between ticks.

Fuck. He'd known the battery was dying.

His foot landed on a stone that scraped unceremoniously against the underlying rock and pitched him forward. He got a mouthful of wet sand and the bruising impact of something cold against his temple.

The object left a green stain on his palm. It was a small, old-fashioned pocket compass, smothered in verdigris, but water had not penetrated the glass covering the needle and indicators.

Flotsam. Somebody had dropped it overboard and the current had deposited it here. The compass snapped smoothly shut in his hand. He pushed himself back onto his knees.

The mist brushed his face like a caress. From this point, he could see the silhouette of the lighthouse above its layers, but not his own path back.

"Give her back." That didn't sound like his own voice, but it came from his mouth. " _Maia!_ "

A beat of breathless stillness.

Then, as something unfolded like an endless image inside a kaleidoscope—

"Alec?"

His head jerked up. Maia was looking down at him from the top of the slope down which he'd skidded. Other than the surprise, she looked unharmed. "Are you okay?"

Relief crashed through him. He had to brace himself. The compass dug its shape deep into his palm. "No, I'm not! What happened to your radio?"

"I'm sorry." She held her hands out. "I was heading back, I swear. I forgot to charge the battery. Which means, dead radio. Which—is why you're here looking like you've seen a ghost."

"The fucking opposite," he breathed out. _I know ghosts. You're alive._ "Look, it doesn't—it doesn't matter. Let's get back before we have to wade."

Without prompting, she took his sand-rough hand. He squeezed hers, probably too hard, but she didn't protest.

*

They followed their own tracks back. Later, Alec would figure he'd never gone more than a hundred yards from the highest waterline.

Yet he'd been certain Maia was in danger. He'd known it in every breath he drew.

She held his hand the whole way back to the station, and eased away with uncharacteristic care. "I'm gonna turn on the beacon. I guess it's my turn to sit fog watch, too, after that."

They were the most routine words she could've spoken. He nodded, hopefully not too much like a robot. Normalcy. What a fine thing that was. "Uh, you want me to bring you some dry clothes? You look a little damp."

"Worry about yourself first," she said, "but yeah. Thanks."

"It's okay." He swallowed, but the lump in his throat didn't even budge. "I'm not mad at you. We made it back. I'll... come and sit up with you."

"I know." She touched his arm, then turned to go.

Alec hugged himself, shivering at last in the approaching twilight. Something had run through him like a stream of molten metal, a sheer purpose, a call he could hear but not make out.

Above the edge of the mist, along the cliff, a light shone like a fallen star, pulsing in the darkness. A shadow grew around the pinprick glow, a blotch of black against the gray and brown of stone and grass.

 _I see you_. It was something. A first step. A warning shot.

The path took him back to the station, to the steadfast shelter of the lighthouse, and his feet knew every stone.

*

_Hold back the wind  
_ _Hold back the rain  
_ _I want to live  
_ _To see good weather_

_I want to live_  
_To see the sun break through  
These days_

— Patrick Wolf, 'This Weather'

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to find me on social media, I am on:
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen)


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